


Much to Hope

by rhoswenmahariel (salutationtothestars)



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 23:50:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5184374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salutationtothestars/pseuds/rhoswenmahariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Hawke’s mother dies, and the white lilies rot on the mantle until she thinks to throw them in the fire, Hawke loses her taste for flowers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i mourn your absence

**Author's Note:**

> "It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” ―Arthur Conan Doyle, The Naval Treaty

After Hawke’s mother dies, and the white lilies rot on the mantle until she thinks to throw them in the fire, Hawke loses her taste for flowers.

Of course, for the next several weeks, she receives nothing but flowers. Her mother had more acquaintances than she ever realized, and she’s made more than her fair share in the years she’s been knocking around Kirkwall. At first she lets them clutter up her little desk with the letters, refusing to move them once they’ve been placed. After a few days of the main hall looking rather like a gaudy garden, Orana begins arranging them around the house. She places them strategically, so that they’re aesthetically pleasing, and picks some of the ostensibly loveliest to place in Hawke’s room.

Privately, Hawke hates them. She hates that they’re everywhere, glaring reminders of her loss never far from her gaze, and she hates the way they make everything smell so sweet it’s cloying. When she tries to bring it up to Orana, however, the little elf girl simply gives her a watery smile and says, “Your mama loved flowers. I think she’d like that this is how people remember her.”

So she leaves them be. It isn’t Orana’s fault that she begins to associate flowers with all the worst things in her life, death and abandonment and failure. As a sort of private joke, she sends one of the last bouquets to Gamlen. He doesn’t get it, of course, but without the humor, black as it is, it comes across like sympathy. She can’t complain if Gamlen thinks better of her than he should. At least it’s a change of pace.

Eventually, the last of the flowers withers and dies. Hawke is unspeakably grateful to see them go. Still, she never manages to shake that sinking feeling whenever she sees a vase of flowers, as if they’re harbingers of something terrible. When poor Saemus dies, and Hawke arrives home with words she shouldn’t have said and things she never had the chance to say roiling in her belly, Bodahn clucks his tongue and says, “We ought to send the viscount our condolences. Some flowers, maybe.” Hawke mutters an agreement, trusts him to take care of it, and heads upstairs to vomit into her chamber pot.

A year or two later, after a brief, unhappy visit to the Dalish encampment, she, Fenris, Merrill, and Varric march their way back down Sundermount. None of them feel particularly happy, but Merrill is the most miserable of them all, tears welling in her eyes when she thinks no one is looking. An hour of this passes by at a crawl, and then Varric hums. Waving away Hawke’s curious frown, he steps off the trodden path and walks among the trees, still keeping pace with them but studying the ground as if looking for something.

When he emerges, holding the biggest daisy Hawke has ever seen, her heart seems to catch in her throat.

“Come here,” Varric says to Merrill. Hawke and Fenris stop to watch, quiet and still as Merrill rubs the heel of her hand under her eyes and stands by Varric. When he gestures, she bends down slightly, far enough that he can reach up and tuck the daisy behind her ear. “There,” he says, giving her a smile. “I knew it would suit you.”

Merrill sobs, and laughs, and for a while she and Varric walk hand in hand. To his credit, Fenris never says a word. He studies Merrill a little closer, perhaps, and even seems to keep an eye on Hawke, but thankfully, it’s left at that. He doesn’t ask why she won’t look at Merrill for long, or question the way she can feel her brow furrowing. It isn’t fair of her, she knows, to resent Merrill’s little touch of happiness. Flowers are supposed to be lovely, comforting. It’s her that’s wrong.

Fenris never forgets. He has a mind like a trap, damn him, which is why, much, much later, when they have reconciled and she is resting with her head over his heart, he strokes her hair and asks, “Is there a reason you hate flowers?”

It startles her away from sleep, and she knows she jumps because she feels Fenris tense. Soothing him, soothing herself, she carefully burrows back into his chest and runs her thumb along his hipbone. “I don’t hate flowers,” she mumbles.

“You dislike them, then,” he counters. He knows her too well. Deflecting is what she does best, and yet he sees through it nearly every time. “You don’t have to answer the question, Hawke. I was only curious.”

For a while, she considers. Fenris must think she’s fallen asleep. His hands start to roam a little, the way he only does when he feels an utter lack of self-consciousness. They’re learning each other, trying to see how they fit back together after so long of growing apart, so she lets him wander as she thinks. When she speaks again, he is touching the curve of her waist, his hand settled into the dip.

“They remind me of losing things,” she says, startling him this time. Composing himself quickly, he stills his hands and leaves them to weigh on her, to encompass her. “This is stupid,” she continues, putting her weight on her hands as she pulls up to look him in the eye, “but can I ask you to do something for me?”

“Anything,” he says, honestly, without any grandeur. He means it, so he says it. Her chest aches.

“Promise that you’ll never send me flowers.”

Fenris considers her with the utmost sincerity, and nods.

She sees very little of flowers, after that. Occasions for sending them are few, and even wildflowers are scarce where she and Fenris go. The next time she thinks about his promise, in fact, is four years later, when an Inquisition agent leads her to a bedroom that’s been hastily prepared for her. He stammers, genuflects to an extent that makes her laugh, and leaves her alone to unpack her things, of which she has none. The vase is the last thing she sees, full of pretty little multicolored flowers that refuse to give up her attention once they have it.

Varric finds her like that, her finger on the petals, lost in thought.

“Shit,” he says, taking her by surprise. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think - I’ll get rid of them, Hawke, I know you don’t-”

When she turns, tears steadily tracking down her cheeks, he stops mid-sentence.

“Varric,” she says, thinking of her mother, of the friends she lost so many years ago, of her brother, of her family, of Fenris, Fenris, _Fenris_. “I’ve missed you.”

Varric takes her hands in his, and she laughs again when he chuckles sheepishly through his own tears. “I’ve missed you, too,” he says.

She keeps the flowers.


	2. compassion; cruelty; pray for me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written after the previous one, but it is intended to sit chronologically in the middle of it. Technically it was a separate prompt, but I wrote it specifically to tie into the idea that for years, Hawke hates flowers.
> 
> In my game, Fenris left Hawke immediately before All That Remains triggered. After the scene ended and Fenris departed, Gamlen could be heard asking after Leandra all the way from Hawke's bedroom. This ties into her complicated feelings.

By the time Hawke sees Fenris again, the white lilies her mother left behind are dying.

They never get thrown away, forgotten in the scramble to search for Leandra before it was too late, and then lost again when messengers and concerned acquaintances begin delivering bereavement flowers. So sorry, they tell Hawke, handing their packages to Bodahn but keeping their eyes on her, so sorry. Hawke never responds. Instead, Bodahn thanks them, promises that Mistress Amell would have thought the flowers lovely, and then places them around Hawke’s desk or on the mantle.

He means well, she knows, but they surround the vase her mother used to hold the lilies that killed her. She will not touch them. She doesn’t tell anyone, but she can smell them, even above the sickening perfume of twenty different kinds of flowers competing for attention. They’re dying.

She hates them - hates them all.

When Fenris comes, he does not bring flowers. It’s a small mercy, even if she never thought he would do such a thing in the first place. He isn’t built for flowers, she thinks, sitting on her bed and watching him enter from the corner of her eyes. He isn’t built for condolences at all, really, which begs the question -

“Why are you here?” she asks, maybe a little more harsh than she intends. Maybe not. She’s feeling pretty harsh anyway.

Fenris shifts his weight back and forth, almost rocking on the balls of his feet. The last time he was here, in her room - well. She isn’t surprised if he’s uncomfortable. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I suppose i was under the assumption that this is what people do.”

Hawke snorts. “People do all sorts of things. I’m sure you saw the mountain of flowers in my foyer. I’ve had letters, apologizing as if they were the ones responsible. Apparently half of Kirkwall is praying for her, whatever good that does. One or two of Mother’s friends even brought food.”

“Your mother brought me food, once.”

When Hawke looks at him, she wishes she hadn’t. He is as beautiful as he’s ever been. The firelight makes his skin shine, his dull grey armor offset by the lines of white she once traced with the pad of a finger. He’s even almost smiling. An ache opens up in the bottom of her chest, wider and deeper than it has ever been before.

Slowly, as if approaching a skittish animal, or sneaking up on an unwitting enemy, Fenris pads across her room and stops by her bedpost, resting a hand on the wood. “It was years ago; I don’t know how she found out where I live. I assume you never told her.” Hawke shakes her head. “She wouldn’t come in, but she gave me a pot of… something, I forget. She said it was extra. It lasted for days.”

Blinking back tears, Hawke clears her throat and curses herself for being so foolish. She has not cried, not once, and she will not start now, especially not in front of him.

“I never knew,” she says, the safest option, she thinks. Fenris hums. He watches her so intently she feels scrutinized, his eyes rarely leaving her face as he studies… something. It’s hard to guess. He still wears a scrap of scarf she knows is hers, a flash of red like blood around his wrist. A favor. She wishes he wouldn’t. Fenris’s life revolves around wallowing - justified, of course, but wallowing. He stews in his guilt and his anger, acknowledging the feelings if not welcoming them, and he uses that to power himself into action. She isn’t made like that.

After a prolonged silence Hawke makes it clear she isn’t going to break, Fenris sighs.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I am sorry.”

Hawke can’t help it - she laughs.

“For what?” she asks.

“Everything.”

He says it so honestly, so matter of fact, that she thinks she hears the crack of her heart as it breaks in two. Warmth floods her cheeks and spills up into her eyes, hot tears threatening to brim over whether she wants them or not. She doesn’t want any of this. Refusing to let him see, she turns her face away and laughs again.

“Why would you be sorry?” Too restless to stay still any longer, Hawke gets to her feet and brushes past Fenris, pacing the wider part of her room. “No one has anything to be sorry for except me. It’s my fault I didn’t get there in time. It’s my fault I didn’t listen when she talked. And it’s my bloody fault I can’t read signals, I don’t know when to stop, all I do is ruin-”

“Hawke,” Fenris says, sharp, the click of the consonant enough to make her stop. She is crying after all, she realizes, reaching up to furiously scrub them away.

“Shit,” she whispers. Fenris only stares.

She wishes they were anyone else, that she could expect him to hold her and let her bawl into his shoulder until she feels better, that she could be someone who would take comfort in that. She wishes she were dead instead of her mother. She doesn’t wish any of these things. She doesn’t know.

“That was the worst day of my life,” she says suddenly, unsure as to why. Fenris hesitates, his ears tilting in slightly different directions, his hand still on her bedpost as if it keeps him rooted.

“I am sorry,” he says again. It’s all he can give. Hawke understands. She hurts, bone-deep, so powerfully she feels she might shake apart for it, but she understands.

“I can’t believe,” she says, sniffling pathetically, feeling incredibly stupid, “you invited my mother into your house.”

Fenris starts, surprised, and then barks out a short laugh. “I suppose I did,” he chuckles. “It’s fortunate for both of us she didn’t have the time.”

“She would have killed you, killed herself trying to scrub the place out, and then I would never have heard the end of it.”

When she smiles, Fenris smiles back. Hers is watery and weak, and his is barely there, but she supposes it’s a start. Of what, exactly, it’s hard to say, but it’s… something. It’s something.

“If you have need,” Fenris says carefully, joining her in the middle of the room, “you may call on me. I can’t… there is little I can offer you. but I am here.”

They stand too close together. His hand on the back of her head is a visceral, almost tangible memory, his lips on her neck, the feel of his skin burning against hers. She turns them all away.

“Are you leaving?” she asks.

“Not if you want me to stay.”

She does, surprisingly. So he stays. They talk of little, sitting in the library while he leafs through some of the books she’s promised she’ll teach him how to read, side-by-side on one of the couches - not touching, but close.

In the morning, she throws the white lilies in the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the flower related prompts "elder - compassion," "nettle - cruelty", and "verbena - pray for me."

**Author's Note:**

> Initially written for a flower-themed prompt on tumblr, for "zinnia - I mourn your absence." You can find me there at salutationtothestars.


End file.
